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Bennett Haselton has written in with his latest report. He starts
"Goodmail has
announced
partnerships with four new ISPs who will charge for "reliable" delivery of
your e-mail
messages if you want to bypass their spam filters. The news will probably
generate another
round of editorials like the ones written a year ago about AOL's plan to
use Goodmail,
including
this
one from Esther Dyson (for it) and
this one
from the EFF (against it)." Follow the magical clicky clicker below to read the rest of this story.

If I could ask one serious
question of anyone who was defending pay-per-email, or sitting on the fence
about it,
this would be it:
Suppose you sent an extremely urgent e-mail to your doctor or your lawyer,
who for the sake
of argument you're not able to reach by phone. The recipient's ISP owner
happens to see the
message before the user retrieves it, and realizes how urgently you need to
get it through.
So he moves it to the recipient's "spam" folder, and then calls you up and
says: pay me $1,000
to move it to the recipient's inbox, or they'll never see it.

Does the ISP have the right to do that? If not, why not?

Perhaps you'd say that Goodmail's 1/4-penny-per-message is reasonable, but
$1,000 for one message is
too much. But then who decides what is "too much"? The marketplace? Then
isn't the ISP admin just
another player in the market, and $1,000 is what they want to charge? If
you don't like it, you
can go somewh... oh, wait, you can't, because there's no other way to get
through to the recipient.
If you ever get through to your doctor or lawyer, they might switch
ISPs after they hear what
happened, but should that be your only recourse?

The problem with the ISP charging $1,000 to deliver your message is not
that $1,000 is "too much",
but that they're charging for a service that has already been paid for. If
your doctor or lawyer
pays for an e-mail address, they're doing so with the understanding that
their ISP will make a reasonable
effort to deliver the non-spam e-mails that people try to send them. If
their ISP then turns around and
asks you for $1,000 to deliver the e-mail,
then they're trying to double-bill for the same service, and if they block
the message because you
don't pay the $1,000, then the ISP is cheating the recipient out of a
service that they've already
purchased. And it's not just the recipient being cheated; if the recipient
has an arrangement with
you, as your doctor or lawyer would, then the ISP is interfering in their
business relationship with
you.

Now, if an ISP using Goodmail offers to let you bypass their filters by
paying 1/4 penny per message, how is
that different from the doctor example? Well, on the face of it, it's
different in at least two
ways: first, because the ISP is charging "only" 1/4 penny per message
instead of $1,000, and second,
they're not saying that your mail will be blocked if you don't pay,
only that it might
be. But are these qualitative differences, or just differences in degree?

Take the cost-per-message.
I have a (verified opt-in) mailing list of about 50,000 people that I send
mail to twice a week.
In the aggregate, it is just important for me to get mail out to those
subscribers, as it is for
some people to get a single mail through to their doctor or lawyer. Also,
in the aggregate, it
would cost me about $1,000 per month if the ISPs collectively asked for 1/4
penny per message and
threatened to block them otherwise. So is there any real difference
between requesting $1,000
to unblock 50,000 e-mails, and requesting $1,000 to unblock a single
e-mail, if you're just
doing it because you know the sender urgently needs to get them
through? (It's not a reflection
of the ISP's costs -- downloading and storing 50,000 messages at 3 K each,
costs almost nothing,
certainly not anything close to $1,000. And again, I would argue it's a
moot point anyway, because those
services have already been paid for.)

And how much difference is there, really, between saying that a message (or
a group of messages)
might be blocked, and saying that a message definitely will be blocked? If
it's bad for your doctor's ISP
to call you up and say, "Give me $1,000 or there's a 100% chance that your
message doesn't get
through," what if they say, "Give me $1,000 or there's a 50% chance that
your message doesn't
get through," isn't that at least 50% as bad? You could say that in my
doctor example, the blocking
was deliberate, but in the case of the spam filter, it's accidental. But
if an ISP
chooses not to fix problems with its spam filter, then in a way it's still
deliberately
creating a certain
percentage of cases where the spam filter will block legitimate mail, even
if those cases occur at
random.

There is one more difference between Goodmail and the scenarios I've
described, which is that Goodmail
not only lets you bypass an ISP's spam filters, it also certifies that you
are trusted and
not a phisher. If an ISP like AOL controls the user-interface that a user
uses to check their mail,
it can display the blue-ribbon "CertifiedEmail" icon next to a
Goodmail-certified message. In this case, an ISP
can plausibly claim that they're letting all legitimate e-mail get through,
but they're still offering a
benefit to Goodmail senders. The problem with this is that since phishing
only works on users who are gullible
to begin with, a phish could just as easily display the CertifiedEmail icon
in the body of the message to
try and gain a user's trust. It's all very well to say that a user should
know that the CertifiedEmail icon
only "counts" when it's displayed in the inbox, not in the message
itself. But a user who knows that, would
probably also know that their bank's Web page is not 209.211.253.169. And
besides, most users of Comcast, Cox,
RoadRunner and Verizon will be using their own mail clients like Eudora
which won't display the
"CertifiedEmail" icon anyway.

So it seems pretty clear that the main benefit of using Goodmail will be
deliverability.
And that's the basic Catch-22:
If an ISP gives the same deliverability to non-Goodmail-certified messages,
then who's going to use it?
On the other hand, if an ISP gives better deliverability to
Goodmail-certified messages than to
other messages (much more likely),
then they are to some extent misrepresenting the services they sell to
their users,
since users expect an ISP to make the best effort to deliver all legitimate
e-mails, not just the ones
from paying senders.

Goodmail likens
their service to FedEx or UPS for "enhanced delivery" of paper mail as a
way of getting the recipient's
attention. But the difference is that if you're trying to reach your
lawyer, then the office complex
where he works (or the city that maintains the streets to his house) is
providing the service that he
expects and has paid for, namely, allowing different companies to deliver
stuff to him there -- and because
you have different choices, that means
FedEx, UPS and the USPS have to compete with each other, and that keeps the
delivery prices down. On the other hand, if an ISP blocks you from mailing
their customer unless you
pay their fee, then the ISP is going against what the customer expects them
to do, and it is precisely
that betrayal of trust that gives
the ISP a monopoly on your ability to reach the customer -- which leads to
them charging monopoly-style prices,
like $1,000 to receive and store a few tens of thousands of messages.

There is a lot of debate about whether "the market" would fix problems of
legitimate e-mail being lost.
Esther Dyson's
editorial
was a classic libertarian defense of the free market as the arbiter of
systems like Goodmail:
"If it's a good model, it will succeed and improve over time. If it's a bad
model, it
will fail. Why not let the customers decide?" Actually I don't think the
free market does
fix most e-mail deliverability problems -- I've been involved in a few
business that sent bulk e-mail
(to subscribers who requested it and confirmed their subscriptions), and
have had conversations with
dozens of others, and we've all had problems sending to Hotmail, AOL, and
Yahoo, and I've never, ever
heard anyone say that their deliverability problems were solved by "the
market".
(Usually the problems just come and go, and nobody knows why.)
But in a way this is
all beside the point. Even if the market would stop more egregious abuses,
what gives ISPs the right
to charge senders for e-mail services that their customers have already
paid for?

I actually met Richard Gingras, the CEO of Goodmail, and Charles Stiles,
the postmaster of AOL, at
a conference in Seattle last year where they were on a panel defending
against the
Goodmail controversy. They seemed like nice guys who were genuinely
blindsided by the criticism
that Goodmail had been receiving.
It's easy to see the point of view of Goodmail's defenders --
if Bob wants to pay Alice to "certify" Bob, why would it be anybody else's
business?
It isn't, until it leads ISPs to steer people towards a system where if you
want to be treated like
a non-spammer, you have to pay -- even if, strictly speaking, the recipient
is already paying to receive
your mail.

As for the much-vaunted free whitelisting privileges that non-Goodmail
senders will continue to enjoy,
in the pre-Goodmail era I once found that AOL was blocking some of my mail
to their users, so I called
their postmaster department and learned the following facts:

The first person I talked to, said that he checked the logs and our
mail was being blocked because
we didn't have reverse DNS set up. I thought this was odd because we did
have it configured, but I thanked
him and hung up.

Then, I called back and got someone different. I asked them the same
question and they said
that according to his logs, our mail
was being blocked because someone else at our ISP was sending spam. I
asked him why they were
blocking our IP address, if it was different from the IP of the alleged
spammer; he paused and said,
"Is there anything else I can help you with?", and this repeated several
times as I thought my phone or
his headset wasn't working, before I realized he was just being a dork.

Then, I called back and got yet another person, and this person said
that he could see our mail was
being blocked because it contained banned content. I was pretty sure
that was wrong, because you get a different-looking bounce if you're
sending mail that contains a banned
string, but I took a note of that anyway.

Then, I called back and got a fourth person, who said that our mail was
being blocked because some of
their users had flagged mail from our IP address as spam. He paused for a
brief conversation
in the background, then came back and added, "This has already been
explained to you, sir." I said that
since I had gotten four different explanations in four different phone
calls, I figured I could just keep
calling and tallying the votes that I got for each explanation, until one
of them emerged as the winner.

Much later I found out from someone else about the AOL whitelisting
program, which I'm currently trying to see if it prevents us from getting
blocked. But if none
of the people answering the phone at the postmaster department knew or told
me about it (and I confirmed
that it did exist at the time), how many other organizations or businesses
don't know?

ISPs adopting Goodmail say that while Goodmail senders can bypass their
spam filters,
non-Goodmail senders will continue
to enjoy the same deliverability rates that they have in the past.
That's what I'm afraid of.

I don't get the big deal about spam. Honestly, you get more junkmail than regular mail on a daily basis, but yet there's no big call to outlaw regular postage and allow only confirmed 3rd parties to send you mail. Why the hell should e-mail be any different? If you want my opinion they should make Internet access a utility just like phone, electric and other things and regulate the piss out of ISPs so they can't start payola practices such as "send us $100 dollars or the e-mail gets it." Spam isn't a bigger deal than junkmail, it's actually less costly, so why do we care so much that we'd let them ruin e-mail?

I only get around 10 parcels of mail a day. It is typically 70% "spam" but it's relatively easy to sort because there are only 10 parcels. If each day I received 500 parcels with still only 3 being things I requested (bills, letters from home, etc..) then I would be severely put off and would definitely be causing a stink. It costs money to send snailmail spam though, so it ends up not being worth the cost in many cases. And I have never received a viagra/penis enlargement ad in the snailmail either...probably something to do with the questionable legality of most of those offers.

You need to have a computer sorting your parcels for you. With things like spamassassin, you don't need to weed through the 500 spam messages to get the three requested emails. It's all done automatically. I get lots of spam directed at my email address, However I don't actually have to see that much of it because I have good filters.

Do things like spamassassin never get false positives? When you register with a website and don't see the "confirmation" email in your inbox, you know to check the most recent entries in your junk folder and mark it non-spam. But what happens to legitimate emails which you are not expecting this very minute but which are identified as spam by your filter?

YES, IT IS. It wastes YOUR ISP's hard-drive, it wastes YOUR time, and it wastes YOUR ISP's BANDWIDTH.

In snail mail at least the junkmailers pay for the mail. With SPAM, they're using YOUR resources to do business. Not to mention promoting the use of botnets and viruses and spyware. They're disrupting the whole e-mail system, don't you get it? About 90% of e-mail I get is spam. That's 10-to-1 ratio. If you don't consider that a big deal, then you've gotten so close to garbage that you forgot how "clean" smells.

This seems like an excellent place to remind people that they can opt out [ftc.gov] of much of that "paper spam". In addition to helping the environment, you're also helping to protect yourself from one vector of identity theft.

Good reminder, it also reminds me that I don't think this works well. I get daily credit card offers from organizations I have no relationship with even though I'm on this list. The telemarketing one seems to work well, however. The difference might be explained in the financial penalties for junk phone calls, which I don't think exist for junk mail.

Paper spam wastes the environment. So does spam (through energy consumption; internet hardware has had to be significantly expanded to accomodate spam.) It's all bad.you could say the same about marketing in general, it uses rescources that could potentially be used for more productive things.

many slashdotters dislike marketing or see it as a "waste". However without it we would have little idea what products were availible. Manufacturers who are unable to find customers (whether direct customers or people

many slashdotters dislike marketing or see it as a "waste". However without it we would have little idea what products were availible. Manufacturers who are unable to find customers (whether direct customers or people who would resell thier product) wouldn't be able to sell thier products and so wouldn't manufacture anything.

I'm a systems/network admin by trade, but right now I'm a graphic artist, so if I thought advertising was a waste I'd have to kill myself (or quit my job.) I don't feel that way. It's

Get rid of the "almost" and you're doing fine.I, for one, sometimes get e-mail advertising that I do not report as spam, because it is very well targeted and the sender has good reason to believe that I'm interested in the product he's selling. But the spam (even filtered and labelled) that comes through my ISP is getting to be too much - currently I'm running a Postfix server at home and seriously thinking about getting a static IP. cbl and spamcop helps me block almost all spam at the server.

"I'm against junk snail mail as well. Even though it doesn't cost me per se, it wastes my time, and unlike tv and web ads, I don't get anything in return for it."Unless you never send anything via post, you most certainly do get something out of it, at least in the US. The US Post Office is pretty much subsidized by spam. You may think 41c for 1st class mail is a lot, but it would probably be triple that if it had to bear the costs of providing reliable mail service to every legitimate postal address in t

And this is currently how it should be. If the spammer had to pick up a portion of your ISP costs based on the amount of spam they were sending, that would be fine. They're incurred business costs would be payed for out of their own pockets instead of being passed on to unwilling consumers, and the consumers would get a net benefit for the inconvenience. Unfortunately, the current situation enables the spammer to shift the majority of the costs of his advertising onto the consumer. If done 'illegitimate

Preach on brother man! =) If anyone reading this is interested in the subject of marketting and how to recognize the ploys, I highly recommend "Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert B. Cialdini.

Spam isn't a bigger deal than junkmail
YES, IT IS. It wastes YOUR ISP's hard-drive, it wastes YOUR time, and it wastes YOUR ISP's BANDWIDTH.
In snail mail at least the junkmailers pay for the mail. With SPAM, they're using YOUR resources to do business. Not to mention promoting the use of botnets and viruses and spyware. They're disrupting the whole e-mail system, don't you get it? About 90% of e-mail I get is spam. That's 10-to-1 ratio. If you don't consider that a big deal, then you've gotten so close t

I get 3 expected items in the mail every month, along with items ordered an delivered. They're the only bills I have that don't have an electronic only option yet. Everything else I get is junk mail which has a hidden cost as well.
The post office has to use more fuel to carry all the extra weight in their vehicles. I have to get it from the mail box, shred it, put it in a garbage bag, and have it picked up by the garbage man. The DMA companies didn't buy my shredder for me, they don't spend 15 minutes shredding junk every week, and they don't subsidize the cost of fuel for the garbage truck that stops at every house to pick up what most likely amounts to tons of extra garbage weight a year. They also don't care if some meth head stops by my mailbox, steals my junk mail, and uses one of the dozens of free credit card offers to steal my identity and start me down the road of a ruined credit rating.
So the cost of junk mail is time, fuel, space, and security.

The post office has to use more fuel to carry all the extra weight in their vehicles.

The post office has to do the same route every day whether they deliver you one piece of mail or 10. Even if they don't have mail for you, they have mail for your neighbors so they have to travel down your road anyway. Driving the route is the biggest contributor of fuel expenses, junk mail just makes it slightly more inefficient. I normally get about 22 mpg on my truck. Towing a trailer around with 1000 pounds of weight in it makes me get about 21 mpg even on hilly routes.

I have to get it from the mail box

Do you check your mail daily? Does carrying a couple ounces of mail to your dwelling cause you so much wear and fuel that you can measure it?

The DMA companies didn't buy my shredder for me, they don't spend 15 minutes shredding junk every week, and they don't subsidize the cost of fuel for the garbage truck that stops at every house to pick up what most likely amounts to tons of extra garbage weight a year.

I don't own a shredder. I heat my house with wood (hey, my heat is carbon neutral and cheaper than oil/coal/gas/electric though it is offset by manual labor) and I save my junk mail to use as starter paper to get the kindling going. It saves me from having to buy paper or starter fluid to get my fires going. Also, even with an extended amount of time, good luck putting my mail back together to get sensitive info when it has all turned to a mishmash of ashes in the bottom of my wood stove. As for my garbage, again, it is the same as the post office. The majority of the fuel is spent just driving to my house. The weight of junk mail is a pittance compared to that. I throw away an average of 3 bags of garbage a week. If I threw away my junk mail, it would be a small fraction of that.

They also don't care if some meth head stops by my mailbox, steals my junk mail, and uses one of the dozens of free credit card offers to steal my identity and start me down the road of a ruined credit rating.

These programs really work... smart DMA people don't want to sell to people who don't like them. It wastes their time and resources to annoy you. Since joining just the federal do not call list, my telemarketing has dropped to near zero (only exceptions being companies I've done business with, politicians and political surveys (yeah, I'm one of those people who gets 1-2 survey calls a month)).

Spam is much, much more annoying to me than junk mail is. Telemarketing probably ranks higher than spam though since it is an immediate interruption in what I'm doing so someone can try to pitch something at me. Email I read at my leisure. It takes me a couple seconds to toss out my junk mail once a day since the envelopes are pretty obvious. I spend much more time making sure spamassassin is correctly classifying spam/ham, setting up whitelists and blacklists, etc than I do dealing with junk mail. Overaggressive filters means I could lose important emails if I don't scan through things carefully. I've never tossed away valid mail (though sometimes I will open a strange looking mail to make sure isn't something important).

At the end of the day, I'm at least wasting the junk mailers money if they send me crap to my mailbox. Even with a bulk rate, they're limited to how much they can send out by the expense of printing it and putting a stamp on it. Spammers incur almost no cost to send out an unlimited amount of garbage. I get 100 spams a day averaging at least 30 megs a month. I have to spend time making sure my network doesn't turn into a bots, cleaning out friends machines which were turned into bots, etc.

If they didn't deliver advertisements, they would only need to deliver mail once or twice a week. nobody uses regular mail for quick correspondences anymore. There is no need to deliver 6 days a week.

Absolutely correct... now, convince the union which controls the employees of the nation's second largest employer that you're going to need to eliminate more than half of their jobs since you're going down to 1 day a week. You'll, of course, still need to staff and manage the actual post office, distributi

Junkmail wastes my time. It wastes the post offices time, it wastes space in my mailbox, it costs the government money, and junkmail has a greater environmental impact than email. With snail mail, the junk mailer pays for the mail, in the same way that everyone else pays for the mail. With email, the mass mailer (in many cases, spammer) shouldn't pay, because there is no cost for anyone else to send an email. Not all spam promotes botnets, viruses, and spyware, in the same way that not all spam or snailmail

How can the parent of this, and its parent both be modded to +5 Insightful, when they are opposed? I would think one is insightful and the other is not.

I always thought the idea of the moderation system was to push trolling down to the bottom and encourage an interesting exchange of ideas. You seem to be implying that there can only be one insightful way to comment on a subject. In any debate, proponents of each side might have valid and insightful points to make. True discussion of ideas shouldn't lead to binary outcomes.

Less costly according to whom. Ever had to buy a Barracuda spam filter? Set up Spamassasin, etal. If you've ever worked at an ISP, spam isn't as cheap as you'd think. Imagine receiving and having to filter 1million plus messages of spam a day. Imagine as that ISP your NSP is passing off the extra charge to you. You do realize that inside those annoying spam messages, many are often images. Image_size * Amount_Of_Mail = Amount_of_Extra_Bandwidth_You_Don't_Need.

If they are unable to operate e-mail for customers based on their current price, they need to raise prices, lower operating costs, or stop providing e-mail altogether. I pay my ISP for a service and I expect to get it without them extorting the websites I chose to do business with for additional "fees" for e-mail delivery or "fees" for preferred content delivery speed (the whole Net Neutrality thing).

If they aren't able to offer the services demanded at the market price, change or get out of the market and make room for someone who can.

Fixing an arguably broken SMTP system with something like Goodmail isn't the way to go. It has been proposed in several forms to transition e-mail from "push" to "pull". When your computer sends and e-mail through mail.yourisp.com, mail.yourisp.com holds that e-mail and notifies recipient@domain.com "I'm holding a message for you from you@yourisp.com". It is then up to the configuration of domain.com whether the e-mail is downloaded immediately, ignored forever, or downloaded partially. This forces spammers

Speak for yourself, please. I can guarantee you that I get more then 100 times more spam then regular junk mail. There is one huge difference, though which makes spam so despicable:

If you want to send me junk mail you have to print it, package it and most important: pay postage for it. So sending junk mail to 10'000'000 recipients at 29cents a pop is friggin' expensive. Sending the same amount of spam is virtually free.

The main problem seems to be from people with "popular" email addresses. With my regular account (first.last@company.com), I get a fair amount of SPAM. My support account, support@company.com, gets *tons* of SPAM. However, this is not a problem for me. I am active in my community (RC Helicopters), and I post in the popular forums. The people there know me. Many know my cell number and will call me directly with any problems.The main problem here seems to be that *huge* companies have problems dealing

I don't encourage that either - in fact you can go to Direct Marketing Association [dmaconsumers.org] and pay a buck to get on a kind of 'do not mail' like (voluntary by DMA members, not enforced by law like on telemarketers).

Another thing I had to stop was a local newspaper trying a new business model. I had canceled subscription to the regular newspaper, but they started delivering a small printing of ads and a few articles - so once a week I had to walk out on the la

FYI - it is not voluntary to DMA members. It is required of DMA members. DMA will put the smackdown on any member that doesn't follow through on the DNM list. I used to work for a mailing list company and every single list got run against the DNM for collisions.

I believe he meant that the DMA members volunteer to do this, unlike other laws which are enforced upon all people. Sort of like a gentleman's agreement, you pay us a dollar and we agree we don't bother you (and a dollar a year to maintain a list is fine by me, imagine if it was per letter you received or sent!). If you're not a member (e.g. you don't volunteer to join) then you're not bound to it, unlike law which binds all. I believe this is the usage of volunteer, not that the members could opt out but g

I get about items of USPS mail per year at my home address. That's because I use a PMB for all of my mail, and because my home address has been submitted to the DMA (Direct Market Association) as an "opt-out" address. It costs nothing and it really works. You must send the DMA a letter every 5 years to "refresh" their database. If you don't, you will start receiving junk.

There is no similar method to opt out of unsolicited e-mail so your conclusions are flawed.

Goodmail is a service for spammers to bypass spam filters for a fee. It is plain to see. By particpating, ISPs that use Goodmail have in effect become spammers themselves. Such ISPs should be avoided like the plague.

The idea that I would communicate anything both important and urgent via e-mail is funny. I no longer trust the incoming e-mail, too much of it is spam. And now the efforts to deal with spam...the filtering and flagging and whatnot kill any confidence I have that the recipient will receive and read the message when I hit the send button.

"So he moves it to the recipient's "spam" folder, and then calls you up and says: pay me $1,000 to move it to the recipient's inbox, or they'll never see it.

Does the ISP have the right to do that? If not, why not?"

You don't have to use your ISP's email. Not everyone has a bevy of choices for their ISP but everyone on the Internet has plenty of e-mail options. An ISP has the right to do such a thing as far as I can tell but if they actually tried pulling a stunt like that, they'd see how quickly they can get people to jump ship on their email services. I wouldn't recommend tying your email into your ISP anyways. You don't always have the option to take your ISP-based email with you when you move or change ISPs.

And that's not even taking into account that Goodmail is a complete sham. The only people using this will be spammers with money looking to get around your spam filter.

The only people using this will be spammers with money looking to get around your spam filter.

The damage that ISPs will suffer by purposefully injecting spam into the normal email stream FAR EXCEEDS any payments for doing so. Goodmail's business model is based on reducing the cost to senders of Confirmed Opt-In email. They know they're confirmed, Goodmail knows they're confirmed, the ISP knows they're confirmed, and the user knows they're confirmed. So what is the problem? The problem is that the sender

Most ISPs I've dealt with don't offer the most robust mail clients, anyway. As a result, I usually read mail via an external POP client or have it forwarded. I currently read all my mailboxes through Gmail.

With alternate web clients and desktop options, I doubt this is as much of a lock as AOL's "we are the one true client" style aproach.

It would be interesting to correlate who gets maked as "good" versus other service's spam filters, though.

What happens if you need to call 911 because of an emergency like you broke your leg or worse? While email isn't 911 it does seem to me that it more and more can and will be used when either the person is unable to use a phone or otherwise does not want to/can't reach the person any other way.
The idea to pay a free email service extra to make SURE your mail gets to where it's going seems great but isn't this a silppery slope? Do we really want to start making extra paying people's mail a higher priority

This reminds me of an anecdote... a gentleman was talking to a young lady and asked her if she would have sex with him for a million dollars. After she thought about it for a moment, she said yes. Then he asked her if she would have sex with him for $50.

"What do I look like, some kind of hooker?" she demanded.

"We've already established that," he said. "Now we're just haggling over your price."

I have a (verified opt-in) mailing list of about 50,000 people that I send mail to twice a week.

Bulk distribution is what RSS feeds are for. If people really want your stuff, they'll subscribe to the feed. Then the recipient is in control.
I'm not impressed by people who claim that people need to receive their newsletter / e-mail spam.

And the rest of us aren't impressed with those who feel everyone set up an RSS feed, regardless of their actual needs. Even as a geek, I just recently found RSS easy enough to deal with that I starting watching feeds. (Google's Reader app is nice and I can see it anywhere.)The majority of people on the internet don't even -know- what RSS is, but they know what email is, and when you say 'mailing list' they know what they're getting into.

That's a nice thing to say, but email is what people want. I can throw a rock and hit 20 people who regularly use email with confidence. I could probably drop a daisy-cutter bomb and not hit anybody who even knows what RSS is. Hell, I've even got a dingus that will send out an RSS feed over email. Electronic mail is still the killer app of the Internet. It has so many benefits people spend gobs of money and time trying to keep it working.

The spam problem is a virus problem. Spam sent within the US comes from zombied machines. That's a problem the ISPs can fix by blocking outbound port 25 traffic except to the ISPs mail relay. Too much mail from one machine means it gets blocked. Spam from outside of the US is almost certainly from China and Korea. There's not much legitimate traffic going from China or Korea to the US, so mail blocks on Chinese/Korean IPs, whitelisting known legitimate IPs, solves 90% of that problem.

The thing about spam is you don't have to completely eliminate it. You just have to make it less effective. It already has a low response rate. If you cut the delivery rate even by 75% you're making it even less fruitful. Eventually the purpose of spam will simply be to try to entice people to bogus Web sites in order to procure more zombied machines so the spammers can stay afloat. That's a recipe for eventual death.

This is something I have setup and have had great success with. Aside from the spam filters I get that are obvious "P3NI5" and such in the text, I have setup an auto response to anyone not whitelisted. Basically, if you are someone not on my white list and you send me a mail, it goes into a holding queue and sits for 5 days (like a spam folder but different in my setup). Any mail that goes here gets sent a auto-reply that basically ask them to send me another email with a confirmation string or the option to go to a web form and enter the email address they sent it from. This will grey-list the email and allow one from that sender through. From that point, I can see its grey-listed and choose to white list or remove from all list or blacklist. If I remove it, they have to repeat the process to get it through again.

The point in goodmail is not to charge people for guaranteed delivery, but to save you the time you'd waste talking with the technical department to figure out what went wrong, what needs to be changed, etc etc.

It's basically a fast path through that bullshit. If you don't have the time to waste on these sort of things, pay the fee, if you do, or the service costs more than you're willing to pay, do it the old way.

The Goodmail premise is filtering. All filters catch false positives. I'm far more worried about losing mail! that being subjected to spam. So I turn all filtering off. So should anyone with high-value mail. I know a local architectural firm did after a purchase order was false-positived.

As for the strawman, you just sue your professional and their ISP. I have no doubt the ISP would get hit for actual, consequential and punative damages.

On another level, email should not be used for high-value communications without backup/acknowledgement. The internet just is _not_ reliable. Email is far less reliable than people suppose.

I know a local architectural firm [turned filters off] after a purchase order was false-positived.

The calculation is not as simple as you imply. If you get a million spams per day (like this guy [acme.com]), then you're probably better off with the spam filter, since without it your chances of catching the one purchase order hiding in 1000000 spams is pretty slim.

Spam filtering becomes worth it when the error rate of the filter is lower than the error rate of a human sorting through the same mail. That level of performance is pretty easy [paulgraham.com] to achieve.

Free markets work, really they do Bennett. If you're paying somebody for something, you expect to Actually Receive it. If you don't, you kick out that vendor and move on to the next. Yes, there may be some pain for the first few people who discover that, but we're a connected society. Reputations are like glass. One crack and it's gone.

I thought the point of a certified email system was not so much that you could "be sure to get through" but that there was a real, identifiable, *sue-able* person or organization that could be sued if the email is in fact spam. Therefore, the email with that label is less likely to be spam, since it's sent by someone already on the hook for punishments if it's spam.

Goodmail is just whoring out the right to spam you, while keeping all the gain for itself. I thought that was the postal service's province?

I don't think the free market can solve all the world's problems, but in this case it does have a fair shot.

The dilemma presented in the writeup is that you can't get messages through to someone (your doctor, mailing list recipients, whoever) because their ISP is extorting you. The author then argues that the free market cannot respond because it is the recipient being screwed (by charging others for a service that the recipient has already paid for), but the recipient is unaware of this abuse because they can't receive the messages.

But, that last part is rather unlikely. You will still be able to contact the recipient elsehow: either by paying the silly fee at least once, or by phoning them, or using a recipient email address not linked to the ISP, or by posting something on a web-site.

Take the example of the mailing list. The author worries about the cost of sending mails to thousands of people. So, basically, your mailing-list signup could say something like "We won't send email to people on ISP X" or "We cannot guarantee delivery to ISP X... click here to find out more." If the user really wanted to sign-up to that mailing list, then they will be annoyed by this. Ultimately end-users will find out about what their ISPs are doing, and switch ISPs (or at least switch email providers).

So the recipients will be empowered to change their email provider. And I'm fairly certain this whole scheme will fail for precisely that reason. The end users (senders or receivers) don't get much of benefit from the service--certainly not a benefit commensurate to the cost. So they will not pay the fees, and the scheme will fail. (Notice that some people have called for nominal 'email costs' many times to prevent spam... such proposals never take off mainly because the users of email don't want that hassle or cost.)

I think it will be possible to vote with our wallets, and watch this little scheme die a painful death.

Suppose you made an extremely urgent phone call to your doctor or your lawyer's office, who for the sake of argument you're not able to reach by email. The receptionist happens to take your message, and realizes how urgently you need to get it through. So he moves it to the bottom of a stack of unimportant messages, and then calls you up and says: pay me $1,000 to bring it to the recipient's attention, or they'll never see it.
Does the receptionist have the right to do that? If not, why not?
Perhaps yo

Cute, but it's not the same thing as the submitter is commenting about. If you're on the phone with someone who is being difficult (something I'm sure we've all had to deal with), there really is little you can do besides ask to speak with their superior and hope they comply. There is nothing you can do but call back later, hoping to get someone else or to talk with the receptionist's boss and report the treatment you received.

If you stop your thought process there, I can see how you might confuse the

... and they are complete utter idiots/wankers. This does not even surprise me at all coming from them. While i am sure there exists some people with clue somewhere, someplace within the thing, most of the people manning the phones are ( as per past experience, numerous comments and dealing of associates, other occasions where i've kibbitzed with people having had to deal with them):

- Insuficciently trained to deal with admins ( where a postmaster/mail line should)- Don't have enough knowledge about how e

Would be to set up a mail rule that rejects mail from their customrs with an error that explains that you will not be able to respond to them at that address due to their use of this service and which suggests alternative web based mail solutions.

Sure if you're a company you're rejecting some big names but I don't think it'd be for very long if everyone did it...

I know that the answer is, "because this allows the ISP to make more money" but if we look at it from the perspective of what's best for users, why exactly is pay-per-message the best solution?Instead, how about I create an anonymous identity including a public key, and I register that anonymous identity with some kind of authority, who charges a very small fee - say two or three dollars. Now I can send all the emails I want. Each email is signed with my private key and email clients can query the authori

...at least in its current form. Now, don't get me wrong, I still employ e-mail, but it's not exactly useful to me. When 90% of the e-mail I and my clients recieve is useless crap, the medium that allows that kind of pathetic signal-noise ratio is just plain not useful in my book.I've got clients that get 10,000+ spam e-mails a day, and we're not even talking large businesses. I'm talking 1 person getting well over 10,000 pieces of useless junk per day, because they don't want to or can't change their e-

...is a way for someone you've opted in to, to prove it. If I wanted to subscribe to a mailing list, I shouldn't send a mail to listmaster@foo.com. I should send an email to mailfilter@myisp.com with the title "whitelist listmaster@foo.com" which would create a keypair, send the private key to listmaster@foo.com and store the public key in a database on the mail server. Then when foo.com wants to send me an email, they sign it with that key, my mail server verifies it and if it's good, it bypasses the SPAM filter.

Obviously I should be able to do a few other things like "blacklist listmaster@foo.com" which would basicly be an unsubscribe which the server would record, then let the mailing list know the next time they try to deliver mail. Same thing if that token is somehow compromised (and/or shared with partners) which start sending you SPAM. That gives pretty much all the benefits of Goodmail, of course without making money for anyone so I guess it won't happen...

Oh yes, and maybe I should point out that this is intended for people that send out mass e-mails, like newsletters and the like and will actually set up such a signing system. It's not intended for everyone. The SPAM filters exteremely rarely have trouble recognizing proper personal mail. But they do have problems detecting wanted newsletterish-stuff from unwanted newsletterish stuff.

I'd been thinking that goodmail was bad until I saw that messages that used it would be specially marked in user interfaces. This completely changed my mind about it. Email whose sender is willing to pay money and have list management compliance tests to have not treated as spam is almost certainly stuff I want to delete unread, and it'll be clearly marked for me. This is a big advantage over the current situation where almost all spam is obviously spam, but list mail from legitimate companies is more diffi

What if I personally declare and mark all "Goodmail" as spam? Will someone else decide I didn't actually mean it? Or don't have the right any more to mean it?

While I applaud having bulk e-mail senders pay a penny or so each to have to send e-mail, it's not like I'm going to see that penny for reading their junk, or get an AdSense payment for clicking on their link.

Wouldn't surprise me to see the ACLU complaining that this hurts the poor, promotes child pornography, or damages Free Speech. How long be

There is an assumption for perfection (or as close as possible) in current email systems. They want to do the job as best they can. They are very complicated systems, and such high expectations means that they must stay active to continually maintain and improve reliability. If there is a 'good enough' level, there might not be the impetus to do as-good-as-possible, rather a good enough for non payers. At worse, it might cause intentional crap code to leak in in order to force payment for use of a syste

Whenever I've had double opt-in list or even paid-subscriber list mail bounced by AOL or had servers blacklisted, no explanation they have ever given me nor any instructions they have provided have proved accurate or helpful. I expect there are smart people in the middle, and cheap tech support with scripts on the edge. Probably demoralized now, too, because they're going to lose their jobs any day as AOL continues to shed operations and outsource to even cheaper, less helpful people.By contrast, I had a pr

This entire argument is based on the hypothetical situation where you couldn't (for sake of argument, right?) get ahold of your doctor or lawyer over the phone or any other way.That is just a ridiculous argument to propose.

Based on that you could start naming all sorts of similar hypothetical situations: say you could only get to your doctor through your neighbor's house, shouldn't you be allowed to walk through? You could only send him a message through a McDonalds hamburger but you had no money; shouldn't

Remember that Goodmail isn't charging senders to get their mail delivered. The charge is to bypass the normal processing that the receiving ISP does to all e-mail and deliver directly into the recipient's inbox. If you don't pay Goodmail to get your mail certified then it still gets delivered, it just gets handled as normal everyday mail. Now if the receiving ISP starts dumping everything not flagged by Goodmail into the spam folder automatically that'll be another matter, but my problem there would be with the ISP and not Goodmail (unless Goodmail was telling the ISP to do this, but they aren't). That problem is one I'd have to take up with the recipient, though, since I'm not a customer of their ISP. But as long as it's the receiving ISP's choice how to handle Goodmail-marked mail, Goodmail and senders can do whatever they please as far as I'm concerned.

For myself, I'm a firm supporter of the ISP's right to filter incoming e-mail however they want. I like the fact that my ISP applies some pretty effective spam filters. I also like the fact that they're unlikely to bypass that filtering just because of a Goodmail signature on messages. The only thing I demand from an ISP is that they make it clear to customers what sort of filtering they do, so customers can decide whether they agree with it or not.

If your doctor wants to use an ISP that restricts his email, that's his business. You can certainly go to another doctor, but you aren't his ISP's customer (he is), so if he's happy with an ISP that charges people to send him mail, that's his call, not yours. If the ISP wanted to only accept mail from domains that start with Q, then it could do so - your doctor might have grounds to complain, especially if they didn't inform him of it, but you certainly don't - his service, his payment, his call.

The argument of only reaching a doctor or lawyer by email is an example of how important mail could be blocked, that example is made up and the author explained it, he then went to elaborate on how HE needs to send 50,000 people mail twice a week and explained it would cost him about $1000 to do that each month.But if you need a different example, what if you ran a large shop and ordered 10,000 chairs to sell, but then realised you made a mistake and only needed 8000... This would cost you a huge amount of

But if you need a different example, what if you ran a large shop and ordered 10,000 chairs to sell, but then realised you made a mistake and only needed 8000... This would cost you a huge amount of money, and if the ISP had access to the email the blackmail could be huge, however it still needs to be paid to save thousands more dollars...

But in this situation, you should not be using email, because email is not reliable and was never intended to be. If you really, truly need reliable communications, you

I guess you've never had to send a document to someone across the country Right Now. The only other method would be overnight... which is just overnight.

I have, actually. The correct procedure in this situation is (1) send by email, (2) confirm receipt by phone, (3) if not received within a suitable time send by a different email address, (4) repeat until confirmed receipt.

If you just send the document and don't check that it's arrived, you're doomed. Email is, quite simply, not reliable or timely, and

We have employees at our company who use email as a primary communications medium. Most of these employees are off-site and travel more time than not, and when clients call in and ask for them, we recommend that the client emails them.

The argument here is predicated on the ridiculous premise that can only reach you need to reach your Doctor or Lawyer urgently (not so bad so far), but you can only do so though email.

No, that was just an example. It was an exaggerated example to "get your attention," but the author makes it rather more concrete when he describes how mailing-list operators will have to spend $1000 per notice to reach their recipients. And although you can phone up your doctor, you can't phone up all the mailing-list recip

It was a very stupid example that won't do much except annoy the reader to the point where he loses interest in the premise.

Micropayments for the right to spam are a pretty good idea. At least they will cut out the really large scale mass mailings like stock pump and dumps, body part enlargement offers, etc.. Yes, somebody will make money in the process, but that doesn't mean that they won't have a positive effect. Of course the implementation has to be sound, otherwise it won't work.

SMTP is a batch "best effort" protocol. Despite the fact that lots of people pretend it's realtime, it's not. You can also request a return-receipt, but the fact is that the far end client doesn't have to honor your request.

If you want a messaging protocol with assured fast delivery, it's not and won't be SMTP due to the design of SMTP.

The only people who know and understand how unreliable it is as a service are the people administering it, not the majority of the end user population.

I actually think most people DO know it's unreliable. Who hasn't had the experience of "I sent you an email about subject X, did you get it?" and received NO as a reply? Anyone that thinks email is reliable isn't really paying attention.

What are you getting for the 1/4 cent per email, assuming your email is not spam? An assurance that Goodmail will not misclassify it as spam?

Yes, this is definately a net neutrality issue, but I think the whole point of this is for businesses to pay for a way for unsolicited emails to get through... meaning spam. The receiver would likely already be able to "whitelist" other senders to ensure they get through.

Goodmail is in essence creating a new way for "legitimate businesses" like coke, nike or mortgage lenders to spam people. Let's not be confused here, these are bulk email rates not for individual to individual. Businesses are really desperate for ways to reach people with their marketing, and sending unsolicited email gets too much backlash and negative attention. Many companies get big money from other companies wanting to reach customers who have opted into their mailing lists, the ISPs and email providers want a piece of that action.

This isn't in any way meant to help email subscribers or recipients reduce junk email, it is meant to increase junk email.